"Help Us, Obi-Wan Rubio, You're Our Only Hope."

The establishment GOP is in panic mode, finally, to take down Donald Trump. So much for the establishment.

Rubio's not much of a Jedi master, if you ask me. Trump, however,
does make a pretty good Darth Vader.

About the only good news for the Republican establishment this week is the demise of Ted Cruz's presidential hopes. He may twitch for a few more votes, but stick a fork in him. All that remains for Cruz is to spoil Rubio's chances.

Which leaves only the intrepid Marco Rubio to fight Donald Trump to the last ditch, a job -- however insufficient he is for it -- that the GOP elites have drafted him for. It remains to be seen what shape this final desperate assault will take.

Howard Fineman points out that there's poison in Trump's business life, and the GOP, as well as the heretofore enabling media, may finally pour him a cupful. Too late?

Jeff Greenfield writes in Politico the elites are readying a nuclear option to blunt Trump. (Spoiler: Everybody gang up and say how bad Trump would be. Not necessarily nuclear, but maybe it's all they have.)

Another Political article points out that money is flowing, mostly to Rubio, for a last-ditch establishment effort to derail Trump.

At the Washington Post, its heavyweight political writers pen a war report about the future of the GOP. Again, Rubio's the last non-Trump man standing. Some future yer party's got there, pardner.

Not to be outdone, the NYTimes draws a portrait of early opportunities to take on Trump that are now morphing into the desperation that nearly all of the party establishment are succumbing to.

Late last fall, the strategists Alex Castellanos and Gail Gitcho, both presidential campaign veterans, reached out to dozens of the party’s leading donors, including the casino magnate Sheldon Adelson and the hedge-fund manager Paul Singer, with a plan to create a “super PAC” that would take down Mr. Trump. In a confidential memo, the strategists laid out the mission of a group they called “ProtectUS.”

“We want voters to imagine Donald Trump in the Big Chair in the Oval Office, with responsibilities for worldwide confrontation at his fingertips,” they wrote in the previously unreported memo. Mr. Castellanos even produced ads portraying Mr. Trump as unfit for the presidency, according to people who saw them and who, along with many of those interviewed, insisted on anonymity to discuss private conversations.

The two strategists, who declined to comment, proposed to attack Mr. Trump in New Hampshire over his business failures and past liberal positions, and emphasized the extreme urgency of their project. A Trump nomination would not only cause Republicans to lose the presidency, they wrote, “but we also lose the Senate, competitive gubernatorial elections and moderate House Republicans.

No major donors committed to the project, and it was abandoned. No other sustained Stop Trump effort sprang up in its place.

What a woeful tale. As someone who thought George W. Bush couldn't win the presidency -- he didn't -- it's hard for me to look at Donald Trump, given all the new-voter support he may be attracting, and say he's destroying the Republican Party and never could win in the general election, regardless of what the ineffectual party elites seem to believe.

For the umpteenth time, holy shit.